506 History and politics poems

Among the personal objects inside a 2100-year-old Chinese tomb, archaeologists found nine acupuncture needles, four gold and five silver. Long before knowing why, ancient doctors knew that pain must be fought with pain. It’s quite simple: an array of needles pricking your arm for a properly functioning heart and lungs. Needles in the feet to ease insomnia and stress. Needles between your eyes to fight infertility. A little pain here, and the effect is felt elsewhere Once, a group of explorers set out to plant a flag on the South Pole, a needle at the heel of the globe, in the middle of nowhere. But before the mission was completed a new world war had begun. The impact of the needle was felt in the world’s brain, in the lobe responsible for short-term memory. When Russia used ideology as acupuncture—a needle over the Urals— it impacted the pancreas and the control of blood sugar: America paid tenfold for whiskey during Prohibition, and at post offices, copies of Joyce’s “immoral”Ulysses were stored for burning. The universe functions as a single body. Stars form lines of needles carefully pinned to a broad hairy back. Their impact is felt in the digestive tract, each day a new beginning. How can you begin a new day not having fully absorbed yesterday’s protein? I was a child when my first teacher mispronounced my last name twice. That pricked me like a needle. A small needle in the earlobe. And suddenly, my vision cleared— I saw poetry, the perfect disguise.

Reconstruction almost worked twelve years and then it didn't and we've been living in that failure ever since the history they don't teach you is usually the important part

I went to the national archives once they let me hold a letter from 1789 just paper just words but i thought about whose hands it passed through to get to mine

History remembers the leaders not the ones who carried the water or wrote the letters or stayed at home and kept things running history is always a narrowing of what actually happened

democracy is a conversation across time the founders talking to us us talking back it's messy it's supposed to be

We built this country too the unrecorded labor the unpaid hands the erased names we built it and we're still being asked to prove we belong here